Sponsor: MailButler

This week MacSparky is sponsored by MailButler. MailButler is a collection of powerful add-ons that make Apple Mail exponentially better. One such feature is email signatures. Email signatures are important. If your email signature tool is tacky, it makes you look bad. If your email signature is too sparse, people think you don’t care. 



MailButler can help you out with that. With MailButler, you can create your email signature from MailButler’s built-in templates. You can also configure photo images, text, and colors to make your own special email signature. Your personal and unique email signatures created with MailButler are responsive to the screen sizes they appear on and look great on mobile devices.

With MailButler, you get a lot more than just better email signatures. Other ways MailButler improves Apple Mail include scheduling, tracking, snoozing email, task tools, inbox pausing and more. If you use Apple Mail, you owe it to yourself to give MailButler a try. 

Sponsor: OmniFocus and the Review Feature

This week the blog is sponsored by my friends over at the Omni Group and their best-in-breed task manager application, OmniFocus. There is so much to love about OmniFocus. It’s a powerful task application that works with you to not only check off your boxes but make sure you’re on track with your own priorities and goals.

OmniFocus represents a lot of rethinking about what a task management application should be and as a result, there are several unique features. One of my favorite unique features is its ability to review projects over time.

OmniFocus allows you to set a review period for all of your projects. It is user customizable on a per project basis and that is part of the reason it’s so powerful. By tapping the Review button a few times a week, you can take a look at all of your projects that are due for an independent review. For a corporate client that I don’t do much work for, that review time may be every six months. For an active project where, perhaps, the client is acquiring a competitor, I may make that review period every four days.

Because I’ve taken the time to set up these review frequencies appropriately, when I tap the Review button I just see those projects that truly require my attention. I’ve made this a regular practice and it has paid great dividends. Using the OmniFocus Review feature I have:

  1. Found projects that fell off the wagon, allowing me to get them back on track and not look like a fool.
  2. Discovered additional work that needs to be done for clients because I took a moment to sip some tea and think about their project in the abstract.

Best of all, a regular review routine gives me peace of mind. Knowing that I’m keeping track of projects lets me know that I’m doing my job and allows me to sleep easy at night. Whenever I feel a little frazzled, it is because I’m behind on project reviews.

Review is just one more reason why I love and use OmniFocus. To learn more head over to the Omni Group and check out OmniFocus.

 



Sponsor: SaneBox – They Respect Your Privacy


This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that brings sanity back to email. There are so many great SaneBox features. It lets you easily defer email to the future. It follows up with you if you don’t get replies to important emails. It automatically sorts your email for you so you can deal with the urgent and save the rest for later. Best of all, this magic works with just about any email application and on any computing platform.

One feature I’ve never mentioned about SaneBox before is that it costs money. You pay for the service. In this day and age, the fact that they have a business model that doesn’t require them to sell your data to someone else is, in fact, a feature. Indeed, SaneBox is very respectful of your data. To pull off their magic tricks, they only look at the email header information (primarily they need to know who sent the email and the subject line). They don’t look at your email body and they don’t sell your data to anyone. SaneBox explains their … well … sane belief in protecting your privacy right here.

So don’t only give your email super-powers, do it with a company that respects your privacy. I’ve been a SaneBox subscriber for years and don’t know how I’d get by without it. Go check it out and use this link to get a discount off your subscription.

Sponsor: Daylite CRM for Mac

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite, the CRM & Project Management app for teams on Mac, iPhone & iPad.

Daylite helps companies manage more leads and projects by organizing all your data so you can work more efficiently and gain valuable insights into your business. 

Recently a law firm in Georgia shared that Daylite has helped them grow from a team of 2 to 13 in just two years. By using Keywords in Daylite to tag how new lead and client heard about them, the firm was able to filter and uncover which methods worked best for attracting new clients. 

They also use Daylite to filter and identify which clients were referring them the wrong type of leads. By educating their referring clients about their services, they saw a big improvement in the type of leads they were getting, which led to more clients.

By using Daylite to capture important information, this firm was able to leverage that data and grow their business.

If you are managing a small to medium sized business, you can’t go wrong with Daylite. It works on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and gives you and your team one place to manage tasks, contacts, calendars, email, and all those other bits you need to make your business successful. Head over to Daylite today and learn more.

Sponsor: Avoid Email Mistakes with MailButler

This week MacSparky is sponsored by MailButler, your personal assistant for Apple Mail. One of the best features of Apple Mail is the plugin architecture, letting you customize the application to suit your needs and the grand-daddy of Apple Mail plugins is this week’s sponsor, MailButler.

With MailButler at your back, you’ll make fewer common email mistakes. Do you ever forget to respond or act upon an email? MailButler lets you create to-do items right from the email message to avoid that.

Do you ever set an email aside and then later forget to get back to it? MailButler has a Snooze feature that puts deferred email right back in your inbox.

Have you ever written an email with the intention of sending it later? MailButler has a scheduling tool that can send that email later for you automatically.

There are so many more ways MailButler helps you avoid mistakes with the “Undo Send” button, attachment reminders, and more.

See how powerful you can make Apple Mail today with MailButler.

Sponsor: The New OmniOutliner 5

This week MacSparky is sponsored by the brand new OmniOutliner, Version 5. The new version adds several new useful features:

Saved Filters
Now you can filter rows based on different criteria: column values, status, note content, and more. You can save each filter to reference later.

Password Protection
Encrypt the documents you’d prefer to stay private. OmniOutliner can now encrypt documents with a password.

Distraction-Free Writing
Stay focused on your writing by automatically hiding the toolbar and sidebars in Full Screen mode.

Document Stats
Get a live view of statistics—rows, words, characters—as you’re typing.

Built-In Themes & Templates
A beautiful set of themes built in to the app.

There’s more including full screen improvements, dark mode, typewriter mode, and customizable keyboard shortcuts. They also have a new business model with the Pro version costing just $59.99. (I got it for half with upgrade pricing based on my purchase of version 4.) 

They also have a minimal, focussed version, OmniOutliner Essentials, that is just $9.99. Head over to the Omni Group and learn all about the new version. You may even recognize that goofy voice on the product videos.

Sponsor: SaneBox and Email Reminders

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can start saving your bacon today. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

  • Wake up everyday to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 
  • Defer email for hours, days, or weeks so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time.
  • Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.
  • Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
  • Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
  • Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot more serious about email reminders with SaneBox. When I send an email to a client or a business associate that requires a reply, I blind copy the email to 1week@sanebox.com or 2days@sanebox.com or april17@sanebox.com. Then I forget about it.

SaneBox keeps track of whether or not I get reply to that email and, if I haven’t received a reply in the designated time, it gives me a reminder. This allows me to dodge the whole process of putting tasks into my system to track email replies. I’ve been using this a lot more lately and I’m saving time as a result. As seen above, this is just one of the many features available to SaneBox subscribers.

The list goes on. Why not straighten out your email in 2017 by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

Sponsor: Daylite – Announcing Team View for Mac

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite, the CRM & Project Management app for teams on Mac, iPhone & iPad. New in Daylite is Team View for Mac. 

Team View gives business owners and managers a quick overview of their team’s workload. You can see everyone’s tasks and appointments for today, total duration of appointments, as well as what’s on their Worklist–separated by each team member. This new feature allows you to manage the workload of your team making sure everyone is busy but not too busy.

“This new feature is an easy way to get a big picture view of how my teams are doing. It makes it easy for me to delegate tasks, check on task status, compare work loads for individuals/teams, and creates a continuity for me between individuals and teams.”

– Libby Flores, COO of E.L. Achieve

Libby and her team have been using Daylite for years to manage their projects and clients. Together they manage between 120-160 projects at a time and rely on Daylite to share and keep track of everyone’s tasks and project info. 

If you are managing a small to medium sized business, you can’t go wrong with Daylite. It works on Mac, iPad, and iPhone and gives you and your team one place to manage tasks, contacts, calendars, email, and all those other bits you need to make your business successful. Head over to Daylite today and learn more.

Sponsor: OmniFocus


This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniFocus from the Omni Group. Last week I just spent several days at the American Bar Association conference where I talked to a lot of lawyers using OmniFocus to hold things together. That shouldn’t surprise you though. OmniFocus is a powerful tool and people that have a lot of tasks to manage love OmniFocus. 

One of the things I love about OmniFocus in particular (and the Omni Group in general) is the way they obsess over small details to make things easier on their users. You can see this in the OmniFocus check circles. In most task management applications the check box is just that … a check box. Not true with OmniFocus.


The OmniFocus check circle shows the status of the attached task. This clever system allows you to immediately understand the status of your task and makes working with OmniFocus that much easier. If the Omni Group spent this much time thinking about how the check-circle works, how much do you think they thought about the rest of the application?
If you would like to up your productivity game, check out OmniFocus.

Sponsor: MailButler for Business

This week MacSparky is sponsored by MailButler. MailButler has just added a new Business subscription plan that includes several features to ensure complete control over email flow for your team. This includes several new features including:

Advanced Tracking

MailButler adds links to your emails so you can seen all the details about your email recipients opening your email messages. Learn when, where, how often, with what kind of device, and in which email client your messages have been viewed. Now you’ll know if your customer has actually opened the email with their invoice or if your colleague received the email with the new spreadsheet.

CRM Support

Customer relationship managers are an essential tool for business but wrangling your email into them has never been easy. MailButler now lets you connect with your CRM tool you automatically get  copies of your outgoing emails in the system through a blind carbon copy.

Correspondent Insight

MailButler Business Plan users also get additional insight on their email correspondents with detailed information, such as social media profiles and company information. 

Custom Signature Templates

MailButler Business Plan members don’t only get the cool MailButler template designer to create their own custom email signature, they can also make a unique corporate signature design and share it with their team members. Give your team a unified, professional looking email signature.

Team Features

Best of all, these team member features are easy to manage using the MailButler Business Plan Dashboard where managers can assign roles and tasks to the team members, watch their activity and usage statistics, as well as share custom signature or message templates.

MailButler’s new Business Plan is a great idea. Take control of email for your team with MailButler for Business.